As You Like ItWilliam Shakespeare

REFERENCE

THE CRITICS

ON THE PASTORAL SETTING

...Externally the setting is that of a conventional pastoral play. The forest is full of shepherds, foresters,
and other creatures who could live together only in an Elysium of escape from the real world. But the Forest
of Arden is no mirage of wish-fulfilment. It is not like the world of Italian pastoral romance, not a country
in which the longings of those bored with city life were realized. It is an actual English woodland through
which real winds blow, a region near the haunts of Robin Hood and his merry men... And what creatures do
they find there? They meet characters who belong to the most artificial of all worlds of fiction, the pastoral
romance. Silvius, the sighing love-sick swain, is there, and Phebe, the obstinately chaste shepherdess. So are
William and Audrey, neither of whom has ever been washed by the romantic imagination or any other
known cleansing agent. They are the shepherd and his lass as they really are, ignorant dirty louts-simple
folk who know nothing but what Nature has taught them. "Here," says Shakespeare, "are
two authentic children of Nature." This is the heterogeneous company to which Rosalind and Orlando
must belong if they prefer Arcadia to the artifices of civilized life. The play thus ridicules the belief that
life close to Nature is best. The comedy is, as Joseph Wood Krutch says, a "playfully satiric fantasy
on the idea of the simple life."

Oscar Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire, 1955

ON ROSALIND

...Rosalind loves Orlando without limit, and... she is the happiest of many happy persons in Arden. Her
criticism of love and cuckooland is unremitting, yet she has not annihilated them. Rather she has preserved
them by removing the flaws of their softness. That is the duty of criticism- a simple duty for a girl with
sound imagination and a healthy heart. As Arden emerges from the fires of "As You Like It" a
perfected symbol of the golden age, so Rosalind steps forth not burned but brightened, a perfected symbol
of the romantic heroine. Romance has been tested in her until we know it cannot shatter; laughter has made
it sure of itself. There is only one thing sillier than being in love, and that is thinking it is silly to be in love.
Rosalind skips through both errors to wisdom.

Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare, 1939

ON TOUCHSTONE

Touchstone's role is that of the Court Jester, the "all-licensed fool." It is as such that he
first appears at Duke Frederick's court, using the Fool's license to mock at the Knight who swore by his
honor that the pancakes were good, and indulging himself at the same time with a side thrust at the Duke,
who loves this honorless Knight. He is threatened, to be sure, with a whipping, the customary penalty for
the Fool who overstepped his bounds- cf. Lear's warning to his Jester- but he is clever enough to sidestep
the danger at Court, and once he is in Arden all danger blows away in the forest air. Here he is free to
practice, unchecked, his vocation, the exposure of folly. That, presumably, is the significance of his name;
he is the touchstone that distinguishes pure from base metal.

Thomas Parrot, Shakespearean Comedy, 1949

ON JAQUES

In this utopian pastoral world the fugitives also come upon the melancholy Jaques. He has no
counterpart in Lodge's novel; he is entirely Shakespeare's invention. Because his only part in the comedy is
to stand aloof from the action and make satiric comment upon all that happens, critics have been tempted to
regard him as Shakespeare's mouthpiece. Many readers have therefore mistaken the famous soliloquy
beginning "All the world's a stage" for a succinct revelation of the pessimism which captured
Shakespeare's mind about 1600. Life to him, they say, had then become just the pageant of futility of the
melancholy Jaques' vision.

This is a naive view of a highly effective dramatic figure- one that had become a popular stage type.
Jaques is Shakespeare's representative of the traveller recently returned from a sojourn on the continent,
laden with boredom and histrionic pessimism. His melancholy is artificial and his disgust with everything at
home is a pose.

Oscar Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire, 1955

[Jaques] cannot be wholly dismissed. A certain sour distaste for life is voided through him, something
most of us feel at some time or other. If he were not there to give expression to it, we might be tempted to
find the picture of life in the forest too sweet. His only action is to interfere in the marriage of Touchstone
and Audrey; and this he merely postpones. His effect, whenever he appears, is to deflate: the effect does
not last and cheerfulness soon breaks in again.

Helen Gardner, "As You Like It," 1970

A FEMINIST VIEWPOINT

...In court, Celia and Rosalind have a completely equal, give-and-take relationship. However, once they
enter the forest in their disguises, Celia's part diminishes. Partly this is because Rosalind's involvement
with Orlando is central to the design, but partly it functions to allow Rosalind to live out a freer, more
assertive and independent role than she could otherwise. This tendency is observable in II, iv, before the
women are aware that Orlando is in the forest too. In male garb, Rosalind automatically becomes the
dominant figure of the two. It is she who deals with the outside world, who can meet and converse with
men, speak and act assertively, even authoritatively. And she is listened to seriously, bantered with, without
the deferential, complimentary, and essentially trivializing address that gentlewomen receive from
gentlemen in Shakespeare's plays. She is thus able to develop and demonstrate areas of her personality that
could not, according to the stage conventions Shakespeare adhered to, be gracefully revealed if she were in
female apparel. She restrains Touchstone's arrogance and disparages Jaques' melancholy; she chides Silvius
and Phebe; she is flip with her father. Above all, she is able to speak to Orlando about love without coyness
or concealment, without having to defend against romantic or erotic attitudes or demonstrations. In short,
she can be a person.

Westlund, Joseph. Shakespeare's Reparative Comedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Readable analysis of As You Like It from a psychoanalytic perspective.

AUTHOR'S WORKS

Shakespeare wrote 37 plays (38 if you include The Two Noble Kinsmen) over a 20-year period, from
about 1590 to 1610. It's difficult to determine the exact dates when many were written, but scholars have
made the following intelligent guesses about his plays and poems: